Biotech's Traffic Cop

Chicago Attorney Lori Andrews Stands Where Science And The Law Intersect

On the frontiers of biotechnology where she has spent her legal career, she serves as both guide and lookout--not just pointing out the territory ahead but also taking us by the arm, looking us square in the eye and asking if we're really sure we want to go there. The terrain she travels is rough, dotted with rocky legal and ethical issues concerning human cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, surrogate motherhood and the trade in human tissue, issues that, if not already, soon will affect each of us.

"I'm interested in the areas where the law has not caught up with medical technology," says Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "Medicine is always looking forward, while the law always looks back. A lawyer from 200 years ago transported to a modern courtroom would be right at home, but a doctor from then would be lost in a modern hospital."

That void between the professions is where Andrews operates. The author of several books on the vexing ethical and legal issues raised by biotechnology, she is increasingly in demand as one of the few independent experts on cloning and other far-reaching medical advances. "It's gotten to the point," she says, "where people say, 'If there's no law, call her.' "

One memorable call was from a doctor in the midst of surgery to implant an embryo into a woman who would be a surrogate mother. Andrews had the impression that he was scrubbed and gloved, an assistant holding the phone to his ear.

"At the last moment, the doctor had been told that the surrogate was the husband's sister. What he wanted to know was, 'If I do the procedure, is it incest?' "

As often happens in her line of work, there were no legal precedents, so she scanned her computer for case law on incest and saw that the primary concern was with preventing sexual constraint and abuse. "That didn't seem to be the issue here," she says. "I told the doctor that, and he went ahead with the procedure."

The subject matter of Andrews' career and her ability to pursue it were born simultaneously. She passed the bar exam the very day in 1978 that Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born.

Andrews already had been interested in the issues that the newborn Louise brought to the headlines. As a psychology major at Yale University, Andrews had written on the psychological aspects of being a hospital patient. Later, she partly financed her Yale Law School education by writing articles on reproductive issues for popular women's magazines.

Aware of his work in related issues, she had sought out Lowell Levin, a professor of public health at the university. He became a mentor. "We had long discussions, we co-authored articles," Levin recalls. "At the time, we were an island in a sea of disinterest." For Andrews, that disinterest became an opportunity.

"There wasn't a lot of competition," she says, "in a field where there were huge issues and no ethical direction from the researchers."

Young and petite, Andrews initially had to battle to be taken seriously. "On a lot of panels I'd be the youngest person, half the age of the other panelists and also the only woman," she says. "I was called 'The Teen Lawyer.' "

She recalled that the American Society of Reproductive Medicine was looking for a speaker on a subject she had just written a book about. "They asked me if there was a male lawyer I could recommend. I sent a note with a couple of names and a list of about 30 questions to ask to be sure he was qualified. Someone from the society got back to me and said, 'We'd like you to give the speech, but could you Golda Meir yourself up a little?' " a reference to the authoritative but unglamorous former Israeli prime minister.

Andrews quickly dispelled doubts about her competence. Just two years out of law school, she was invited to Germany to speak at the First World Congress on in-vitro fertilization. Two years later, she was testifying at congressional hearings, advocating that people have a right to create families using the latest reproductive technologies.

Andrews brings a tenacious legal mind to her subject, but she also believes that being a woman and a mother deepens her perspective.

"I think that being a mother makes me ask different questions," she says. "I was at a two-day National Institutes of Health conference in which the question was, 'Should we do gene therapy on a fetus in utero?' There were slides shown of fetuses and slides of fathers holding infants. But there were no slides showing mothers. I asked, 'What about the risks of infection and miscarriage?' Scientists and politicians, most of them being men, forget about the geography of these therapies."

Time after time, she irritates researchers by pointing out that "can" doesn't necessarily mean "should" and that, whenever science intersects human reproduction or human gene mapping or human cloning, there's a person there.